What are the sleeve, ring, and tip of a jack?

[PostPaintBoy]

Hey folks. I'm wiring up my first build and I'm confused as to what the sleeve, ring and jack are. I'm going by the madbean wiring diagram. I appologize for such a rookie question. Thanks guys.

[jkokura]

Sleeve ring and tip...

Take a look at this page:

http://www.smallbearelec.com/Detail.bok?no=89

Jacob

[PostPaintBoy]

Awesome, thanks. Now on the madbean wiring diagram, is the thing in the bottom left hand corner for a 9v power supply?

[jkokura]

Which diagram? Could you link it?

Jacob

[PostPaintBoy]

sure http://www.madbeanpedals.com/forum/index.php?action=dlattach;topic=707.0;attach=212;image

[jkokura]

Yes, that is a 9v jack.

Jacob

[lincolnic]

Okay, so, dumb question, but I learned from the BYOC wiring diagrams, and they've got them labelled as ring on top and sleeve in the middle (the Small Bear link says sleeve on top and ring in the middle). Have I been Doing It Wrong?

[jkokura]

Maybe, maybe not. Not all jacks are the same. The jacks you have, you need to figure out which tab connects to which part of a plug. Look closely at your jack and use a plug and see if you can figure if out.

Jacob

[madbean]

That illustration is just how it is in my Eagle library. The important thing is the connection...you can ignore how it's pictured in my diagram (it's actually upside down!).

[lincolnic]

Well, I've been using the Neutrik jacks (described on the SB website as functional equivalents of the Switchcraft you linked to), but I haven't ever run into any grounding issues with my pedals. So now I'm even more confused.

[jkokura]

Well, I think you need to understand about jacks a bit.

Ultimately the sleeve should connect to ground. We use mono cables for guitar, and so we should only need mono jacks most of the time. However, that means our batteries are always connected and draining if we do that. Nobody wants their battery to be dead after only a day or two, so we use stereo jacks for the input, and these allow us to disconnect the battery when the pedal isn't in use.

On a stereo jack, we see that the sleeve AND the ring connect to ground when a mono plug is used. So instead of tying the batter negative straight to ground, we attach it to the ring tab of tr jack. This way, the connection to ground is broken when you yak a cable out of the jack, and the battery doesn't drain.

So if you switched the ground to the ring, and the battery to the sleeve by accident, you wouldn't notice a problem with ground loops because you have to plug a cable in to make the pedal work, and that would connect everything to ground anyway! The only problem you should have is that your battery would drain constantly. You should switch it to make sure that the battery negative is connected to the ring of the jack, and the ground is attached to the sleeve.

Jacob

[lincolnic]

Thanks for the explanation, Jacob. Here's the thing, though: I've got a couple of pedals (namely, my Zombii and BYOC Mouse) that have had batteries in them since at least July, wired in this way (pg 14: http://buildyourownclone.com/mouseinstructions.pdf), and I just plugged a cable into each and the LEDs came on fully bright. I can't listen to them since it's late right now, but if the batteries were being drained constantly, surely they wouldn't have lasted this long, right?

If I wanted to check with a DMM if the batteries were being drained while the pedal was off, how would I go about doing it?